Mickadeit: Chance making room for bigger shows

I don't remember which play I saw first at the Chance Theater in Anaheim. I do remember my first impression of the theater: a cramped lobby in which the line for the box office threatened to intertwine with the line for the two bathrooms so that one might be moved to inquire of a fellow patron standing in a queue: "Is this tickets or toilets?"

For all its edgy goodness, the 49-seat Chance does challenge its loyal patrons to be patient. I'd heard rumors that an expansion was in the works but that the theater was waiting to have a major donor aboard before announcing. But the plan last week went beyond the whisper stages, forced by the need to publicly request the city Planning Commission's permission to expand.

The city approved doubling the size, from 3,000 to 6,000 square feet, and tripling the number of seats, to 150. Thus, the curtain was pulled back, at least a bit, and I called two of the co-founders, Casey Long and Oanh Nguyen.

The hope, Long says, is by year's end to move out of the Chance's space on the east end of an East La Palma Avenue commercial building and into a space on the west end of the same building.

"We always intended to stay in Anaheim. The space became available and it just kind of fell into place." Theater officials are now meeting with an architect and engineer to come up with a design.

The beauty of the 49-seat experience, of course, is the intimacy between the cast and the audience. I've been at performances in which the actors were literally in the first row. You see their tonsils when they sing.

"We're not going to lose the flexibility of the space," Long promised. "The new space is not going to be so big that you are going to lose the intimacy of live theater."

What, then, is the point of expanding?

"It's about maintaining the intimacy and expanding the possibilities," says Nguyen, the artistic director. "There are shows that we can't do now."

"How so?" I asked. "You figured out how to do 'West Side Story' in a 49-seat theater."

It's not the size of the theatrical space, he explained. It's that the larger audience brings in more revenue, which allows directors to cast plays that have difficult roles to fill. The experience required for some roles can be found only in the pool of union actors who command at least three times the salary of nonunion actors.

"It just opens up the talent pool of artists. (Now) we can't cast all ages and ethnicities. We're all thrilled and excited to take this next step."